Greenery in Urban Sketching

1. Intro : Hi guys. I'm Julia Henze, an illustrator and urban sketcher based in Netherlands. I've made a few urban sketching classes so far. It's really cool to see all your beautiful drawings in the project gallery. The topic I haven't covered yet but I think it will be helpful to make your sketches even more impressive is greenery. I think the greenery is an essential part of sketching. If you know what to do, it can enrich your sketches enormously. Most of the urban sketches have their own manner of drawing greenery. It depends on their style of drawing, materials they use and the sort of greenery they tend to draw. In this class, I want to teach you the basics of greenery sketching and give you the instruments you can use to develop your own style. What we're actually going to do in this class is learning how to get from here to here. But of course, there will be much more. We're going to look at general rules for drawing greenery, discover greenery shapes, learn how to draw details, apply shadows and colors, and I'll be giving you tips on how to create a greenery scene. This is a beginners class so I tried to make it as simple as possible. Almost every part includes drawing exercises. Please join me in doing them. Because from an old experience, I can tell you that from just watching, your skill won't improve. If you really want to learn something, you need to do it yourself and practice. Are you ready? Let's get started. 2. Materials: You can do urban sketching with any materials, from Morocco graphite pencil to watercolor guash markers or whatever you want. Still, the most common way of sketching is actually by using a pencil or a fine liner and watercolor. That's what I'm going to teach you in this class. For most exercises, I would recommend using a regular graphite pencil. I personally prefer 2b pencils for sketching. They are a bit softer than HBs', and that allows me to create some thickness and darkness where IT. From my experience as soft pencil draws a bit easier. For practicing with textures you also can use a graphite pencil or a fine liner and of course some drawing paper. There will be too short exercises with the brush pen. If you don't have a brush pen, a regular or thin brush will be great as well. In the last part of this class, I'll be demonstrating how to do coloring with watercolor paints. So for that part, you will need water color a soft pointed water color brush and paper you can use for water color. I'm going to use this Winsor and Newton sable water color brush which is absolutely my favorite. I bought it for water color class I followed a while ago and it's so flexible and soft, and I love that it holds a good amount of water and paint in its belly. Which is essential by painting with watercolor. I'm going to use these sea white watercolor paper for color charts and practicing and the Arches watercolor paper for the final sketch. I know that most of the urban sketchers use sketch books for the drawings. Of course it's also totally great. Just remember to check that the paper in your sketch book is suitable for watercolor. As for colors, I am going to use Winsor yellow and trans yellow. It's completely fine if you don't have exactly the same colors. You can replace them with any other warm yellows. By warm, I mean that the color is more orange than lemon. I'm also going to use ocher, ultramarine blue. I think every student or professional grade watercolor set includes an ultramarine blue. So it shouldn't be a problem to find it. It will be great if you have any other blue colors like idanthrone or cobalt blue, otherwise, you can use ultramarine for all the exercises. The last the colors I am going to use are raw sienna and burnt umber. 3. General Rules: I want to start this class with something that is not necessary about greenery, but I think it's essential to know this when you want to learn drawing greenery. So in this class, we will discuss two things. First, how we see the world with our eyes. This is all about how close or far objects are from us, and second, how we see the world as an artist. This is all about making choices to draw or not to draw something. I want to point out these two things, instead of just teaching you how to draw a tree or a bush. Because even if you learn how to create the most beautiful tree in the world, you still need to know how to integrate it in a scene. This class is about greenery and urban sketching and I want you to learn how to create a scene that intrigues people that look at it and not just to draw a bunch of trees or bushes. So let's take a look at how we see objects close to us and how we see them when they're in the distance. Here is our example scene. I used a drawing instead of a photo and the same bush to make the changes come close to far, very obvious. But before we go into depth, I want to ask you to start thinking of all your potential sketching scenes as being a theater stage with cut out pieces of scenery. The planes closest to you will be the foreground, the furthers the background, and somewhere in the middle will be the middle ground. Let's take a look at every visual plane one by one. Starting with the closest the foreground. The closer objects are to us, the bigger they appear and also details and textures appear big and sharp. We can see every leaf and flower very clear now, and besides the global shadow that every object has we can also distinguish shadows form an owned flowers and leaves. The combination of the shadows creates extra dark colors on the shadowed side, while the colors on the light side are the most intense. That means that there is a lot of contrast in the foreground. The next plane is the middle ground. Objects get small in the distance. Also details appear way smaller than in the foreground, we can't see every digital anymore, but we do see that the bush has leaves and flowers. Then the most cases we're also can see what form they have also shadows appear less detailed here. Colors get less intense and there is less contrast than the foreground, lights and darks begin to merge a little bit. In the background, everything gets even smaller. We barely can see details or in the most cases we can't see them at all. The shadows are more general and appear much lighter than in the middle and the foreground, the colors are light, there are slightly bluish and there's not much contrast. So you can see that the flowers that had a bright orange color in the foreground became cool, pink in the background. It's kind of an illusion, of course, if you go close to that farthest bush, it would have the same color as one in the foreground, but the dust and the vapor particles in the atmosphere cause light the bland. So we see objects differently in the distance. Summarized, objects in the foreground are the biggest most detailed. Also, the shadows are the most detailed and the colors are the most intense and have the most contrast and they become smaller, less detailed, less saturated, and less contrasting with distance it looks like objects and colors tend to fade on the horizon. This is how our eyes see the world around us and it's important to stick to it in our drawings if we want to make them look more or less realistic. For instance, the background can be bright sharp and detailed, while the fore or middle ground is still not detailed at all. However, there is something like focus, if you ever learned photography, you know that you can choose to focus on the most interesting object or objects while having the rest of the elements in the image blurring. The sharper part of the image will attract the most attention, they call it focal point or a point of interest. Is the part of the visual composition that attracts the viewer's eyes most quickly and holds it longest. It works, not exactly the same with them all over, because we have so many more instruments to play with it. But the main idea is still the same. Choosing the most interesting part of a scene and put it in spotlights. Obviously, the way we see objects nearby and then in the distance is still the same. So the things I told you before still worked here to a greater stand. So objects get smaller, details become less perceivable and colors duller. Still in our sketches, we can choose to skip some parts of a scene or make them less perceptible and emphasize the other parts through the color, line thickness, detailing and so on. The first thing we have to ask ourselves before starting a new sketch is, why am I drawing this and what does attract me the most in this scene, what is main point of interest? The point of interest may have be an object, a group of objects, or a part, or parts of an object or objects. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how to choose the most interesting part of a scene because it's absolutely a matter of preference, but I can give you a tip so you choose your point of interest more conscious. Don't look too much on the color, but focus on shapes, details, and textures. One of the most essential things than choosing their focal point is that it's not the color that makes an object interesting, but these form, how detailed or textured it is. What details and textures look like? If you understand how to draw them, all this things will make your sketch true, while the most beautiful color only doesn't make it look real interesting, you can choose any color you want in your sketches. But even object itself is boring, doesn't have an interesting details and textures or the other way around. It's so complicated that you have no idea how to draw it in the right way, then your drawing will look weak and uninteresting, in this example the focus is on the group of objects. A point of a building with a balcony, some greenery and the stripes on shadowing. Which is always a great eye catcher because of it's form and details. So I choose to make them stand out by drawing them quite detailed and adding color and then the left less important things that are maybe too complicated to draw, uncolored and suggestive, beware of that suggested objects should still appear recognizable and have the right proportions. In this example, the focus is on parts of objects and here you can clearly see how important details and textures are and how unimportant the color is. There is no color at all and still certain parts of the drawing keep holding our attention and the entire drawing makes us engage in this scene. By the way, another great feature of focusing on parts of objects is a perfect way to balance your composition. The point of interest might also be part of a scene. For example, one of the planes we discussed before here the focus is obviously on the foreground. It's colored and detailed while the background, or actually in our theater stage system, the middle ground is less detailed and uncolored, that makes us focus on this cutaneous trees instead of a boring house behind them and here is the focus on the background. I think it's quite an exceptional situation. When we talked about planes, I told you that the colors in the background are dull and blueish and there is not much contrast. In this case, I chose to break this rule and make the houses in the background the brightest, the most detailed, and the most outstanding. This is my focal point. The part of the scene I found the most interesting to draw and essential to show a viewer in contradiction to the endless field full of grasses and flowers. That is way too complicated to draw and actually not really exciting. In this last example, the focus is on the middle ground. I think you already got the idea. The point of interest is the most colorful, if you use colors, the most detailed and most contrasting part of the sketch. However, we need to take into account that the objects get smaller, details get less perceivable and shadows are more global. To show the difference, we would probably draw some leaves and flower petals on the bush and the background, while a bush and the background will have a global shadow and no leaves, or at most a suggestion of leaf bunches. How to deal with the focal point practically? There are many different ways to make the point of interest and out. For example, by color or by color contrast, by wearing the line thickness or by playing the showing details, this topic is too broad for this class, but when you draw a scene, try to create a difference between the most and the less interesting parts. It especially plays at all when you have a lot of greenery in a scene, don't draw every tree or bush you can see, but choose the most interesting ones and focus on them, leaving the less interesting parts unexposed. 4. Shapes: In this part, we will mainly focus on the middle ground because this is what we often draw in urban sketching. Previously, I said, I was going to teach you how to draw greenery incorporated in an urban scene. But of course, you also need to know how to draw a single tree or a bush before you can draw a whole scene. I think that the biggest problem for beginning artists, is the complexity of objects and especially scenes they're trying to draw. The good news is, that even the most complex object or a scene, exist of easy to understand parts and shapes. You only have to learn to distinguish these shapes and turn them into objects, trees, and bushes. Later in this class, we will talk about how to integrate them into a scene. But first, let's take a look at the step-by-step drawing process. As I said before, I think the most efficient way of drawing any objects in the urban sketching, especially if you're a beginner, is to build them up, starting with simple shapes like a sphere, a cube, a cylinder or a cone. Then sketching the global form and finishing with drawing out details. We leave coloring for now, until the last part of this class, where we'll go in detail with color and coloring. In this part of the class, we will focus on the first two steps, starting with the simple shapes and making a counter drawing out of it. Later, I'm going to show you how to do shadowing using textures, so you can kill two birds with one stone. When you master all the three steps, you will probably mix up the second and the third. But in the beginning, it's essential to stick to these steps as there are. Let's take a look at these two trees. There are slightly different, the crown of the left one has a slimmer and longer shape, while the right one is wider and shorter. But I think we can easily use a sphere to draw on both. I start sketching with a line that indicates the direction of the trunk. Since it's a beginners class, I want to keep it simple and draw and straight trunk. I always draw the bottom line because it's important to determine the location of the greenery in sketch, in order to draw everything in the right place. Then, I draw a circle that will become a sphere when they go over the shadowing. The circle shouldn't be perfectly round of course, it's just an aid, but it should be as big as the tree crown and it's essential here to draw it quite big compared to the trunk. A quite common mistake of beginning artists, is that they draw a trunk way too thick and a crown way too small. Look at trees around you and try to capture the difference between the size of the crown and the trunk. It's probably much bigger than you think. The next step is to transform this lines and the circle into a tree. When you draw a complicated tree with a lot of branches from a reference, you don't need to draw all the branches and the trunk shouldn't have the exact form. But try to keep the right proportions of a form and the direction as far as possible. Don't forget how a tree grows. The trunk is always thicker at the bottom, and it gets thinner closer to the top. The same as for every branch. They are thicker where they connect to the trunk or another branch, and thinner at the top. In the next part of the class, we will practice drawing different textures and lines, and I'm going to show you how to create a lively contour line. But for this part, it's only important for you to understand that we draw a tree crown with a kind of squikly, curvy, zigzag lines and I also prefer to draw the trunk not too small. The regular line makes it look much more natural and interesting. To make the crown look long and slim, we just longer the line in the same manner and draw a conical top. Exactly the same way I'm doing the second tree, but this time I add the volume on the sides. When we go over to discuss shadows, you will understand why I want to teach you this method, instead of drawing the shape of the crown at once. Not all the greenery is that simple as these trees. A lot of trees and bushes have a much more complicated form. We can't discuss every tree and bush shape, but I want to give you some guidelines, that will help you draw the most greenery. Let's take a look at this bush. When we look at the form and shadows, it's seems to consist of a few shapes, and that's correct. Every big branch creates with this leaves a spherical form that merges into another spherical form from another branch. I call it the compound shape, and I want to show you how to deal with it. This time, I draw a few spheres crossing each other. Some are closer to us and others are behind them. When you are outside, remember that this shouldn't be exactly the same as in the reference. Drawing is an impression of what we see. Make one sphere but bigger or smaller, if you think it would look better, but keep in mind, which ones are closer and which ones are farther from you. I will curve trunks and branches slightly and now we can draw the contour with the same winding line we did before. Follow the shapes of the spheres but not 100 percent. Just try to create the shape that looks like a nice bush crown. The next shape I want to cover, is a cube or a box. This bush has not precisely a box form of course, but a kind of lying down letter L, but in essence, it works pretty much the same. Recreate the box shape first, cut off the back and then draw a contour of the bush. Cypress trees have a conical shape. So, we draw a con, a short trunk underneath and create the contour. These trees have long branches that grows upwards into the air and it's very important to draw them that way. So that's all for shapes. For practice, I want you to draw some different trees and bushes, at least one for ever shape I covered in this video. You can use my photos or look out your window and see what you find there. The only condition is, that the references are clear and easy to draw. 5. Textures and Details | Part 1: I think this is the most fun part of this class, but there are lot of exercises. Feel free to use a fineliner or a pen or a pencil for this, the most important thing is that you get some ideas for drawing greenery textures, and get inspired to make up your own. I'm absolutely excited to see what you come up with. But first, let's take a look at what I've got for you. You can find a blank practicing sheet here under Project and Resources or make your own practicing sheets. We start with some hatching, straight, parallel strokes, short and long. You also can try to do them vertically or angle them. It's not only an excellent way to loosen up your hand, it's also great for creating textures and shadowing your sketches. Try to get the stokes parallel to each other as much as you can, and please don't use a ruler because the purpose of this exercise is to train your hand than your eyes. In this example, I use the hatching on the background to visually get the tree trunk forward. The next exercise is to make sure to curve the strokes separately or in a row. You can also do them over each other to create a darker shade. A simple, but a great way to create the suggestion of leaves on trees in the distance. You can see in this example, how applying these strokes and those are all just thicker. Let us create a volume on the tree crown. The next exercise is to draw leaves branches, so that it can make a suggestion of certain kinds of leaves without drawing out by making them longer or thinner or the other way around shorter and thicker. Drawing the length creates more dynamics and make the leaf branches look more realistic. In reality after all, they also don't have the same length. Same here, more texture on the shadowed side and less on the lighted side. The next exercise is quite difficult, but absolutely great for loosening up your hand and it creates a really cool texture. You draw the first section at an upside down triangle with a rounded bottom. Draw the second section, connected with this left corner to the first one and then draw the third connected with its stope to that connection point and built up the pattern, where the direction, the size, the form, and the density of the elements, start drawing very slowly and then increase speed gradually. I prefer to use a one-way directive pattern in the tree, but you can also try to mix them. When drawing greenery in the fore and middle ground, we might want to show some separate leaves, so we can accentuate the greenery's proximity and again, change in length, the thickness, the direction, and the form of the leaves. This exercise is also an excellent way to suggest leaves without drawing them out. With a spiral movement, re-create the roll of leaves. It looks less natural than the branches of recently before, but it works very quickly and it's also great for shadowing. The examples I showed you so far, I drew with a fineliner over the watercolor. Of course, you can use the same textures without using a new color. We will cover it in the next part of this class when I'm going to talk about shadowing. 6. Textures and Details | Part 2: In the examples I showed you so far, I drew with a Fineliner over the watercolor. You can use the same textures without using any color. We will cover it in the next part of this class, when I'm going to talk about shadowing. In the previous video, I told you that the contour of a tree or bush should be drawn with a lively curve align. During this exercise, you can train your hand to make such a line. It's very important to draw the line with short moves, changing the direction and the length constantly, but not too much. I would recommend you to look very carefully at contours of different trees and try to reproduce them partially or entirely. In this example, you can see how to use it in a slightly different way. Here I suggest a lower edge of the tree crown. The next exercise is one of my favorites. In one of my previous classes, some of you asked me to show how to draw grass. Well, here it is. An absolutely simple suggestion of a grass bench. Start with the shortest blades a bit curved. I think it's a very natural movement for your hand, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Build it up with every next blade a bit longer than the previous one and then, the other way around. You can also make a sequence of blades or throw some separate lines in the bunch. In this example, you can see that I don't feel the whole foreground with grass, but I will only draw few branches to suggest a grass field. It depends on what you want to show you sketch. Is the grass in the foreground long and beautiful, then you can draw more of it. With this exercise, we are practicing drawing tree trunks with a curvy and shake line. Continue drawing more trunks to practice. Look outside, study in what directions branches grow, how they connect to the trunk and the other branches, and how thick they are compared to the trunk and the crown. There are different ways to add some volume and textures to a trunk. One of the most simple I think, is to do some edging here and there, not too much, just to suggest that it's not totally flat. I do it with a bit of curve and the strokes quick and not too perfect. If had the thicker line on the shadowed side, the volume will appear even more apparent. When we draw trees in the foreground where we can see the back very clearly, we can apply this texture depending on a tree kind, it will look different, but the main purpose of this exercise is to show that you don't have to draw out every little detail, but at the same time you need to do something to make trees with a very distinctive back look more interesting and realistic. Here you can see that I mix different textures because it prevents my sketch from being boring. In the last two exercises, I want to show you how to use a brush banyan sketches, if you don't have one, you can use a regular thin brush and start. A brush pen allows us to draw a lot of trees in a wink of an eye. You can vary the line thickness by changing pressure, but there is an essential thing you need to know, as I told you before, branches in the trunk are always thick at the bottom and thinner at the top. To achieve it, we have to start with almost no pressure on the top and gradually increase it. Drawing it in the opposite direction will produce a weird line that doesn't look like a three branch or trunk. Now we can add some leaves from one of the previous exercises. Suddenly, it looks like a simple scene. As you can see in this example, it's also cool to combine it with watercolor. The very last exercise with texturing details is just playing with the brush band throughout long and short strokes. Try to combine them, change the direction and the pressure. Draw some grass, a bush or tree. This is all for texturing. I hope you like the exercises. The more textures you learn and master, the more attractive your sketches will be, and the bigger the chance that you will develop your own individual drawing style. 7. Shadows | Part 1: >. In this part, we will continue to work on our contour drawings using the material learned in the previous video. As I already said, simple shapes make it easier to understand shadowing. They're not exactly the same one we draw greenery, but it's a good way to learn how it works. Let's start with a sphere. As you can see, a two-dimensional flat circle changed into a three-dimensional sphere only by adding shadows. Because light and shadow create the volume that is so essential on our sketches. A flat drawing becomes so much more impressive when we add volume to objects, at least to the most important ones. Do remember we talked about the point of interest? This is also a great way to create the difference between the more and the less important objects. I want to make it too difficult for you by explaining the whole light and shadow theory, I just want to show you very briefly where the lightest side will be and where the darkest. I think that the most confusing thing by shadowing is, that you try to draw shadows as they are and that might work when you draw from a photograph, but it doesn't if you draw on the go. Shadow is already challenging to capture for a beginning artists and then they also change so quickly that it's just impossible to get them right, but no worries. There is a technique that a lot of artists use and is quite simple. The only condition is that you try the forget the shadows you see in reality and draw what you have learned. The first thing we need to do is to decide where the light comes form. Let's place our light source in the upper left corner; upper because the natural light always comes from the top left because I prefer to have it on the left in the most of my sketches. I would recommend you to do the same, at least during this class. Lets take a look at how it works in practice. The light comes from the upper left corner, which means that the lightest part will be here, midtones here, and the darkest sport here. Of course, there will be a cast shadow. Trunks and branches have a cylindrical form. On a cylinder, the lightest part will be here, midtones here and the darkest core shadow here. Of course, a trunks also cast shadow. Differently forms of sphere, we will never see the light at the top of the cylinder because of a tray crown. The crown blocks the light of the sun and creates a dark shadow on the trunk and the branches. It's very important not to forget that and the whole three creates a cast shadow on the ground. You don't need to draw it precisely in the form of the tree with all the branches and leaves, keep it abstract. It should be a sketchy suggestion of a cast shadow, not the exact drawing. Now it's time to bring our text exercise into practice. Whatever text you'd choose for all the tree crown, we apply as it were a sphere. Let's detail top-left, the lightest part, the most detailed bottom right, the core shadow and then add shadows to the trunk and the branches as they were cylinders. The same idea but a bit more complicated for this bush. I've already told you that it is a common shape that exist from several spheres. The difference with the simple tree we drew before, is that this is a double shadowed. It has global light and shadow and every single sphere has also its own light and shadow. Maybe it's too complicated for a beginners class, but I just wanted to show you briefly how it works. This same idea is for the cube or box shaped granary. The top is the lightest, midtones will be the front, and core shadow on the right side. Of course, there will be the cast shadow as well. Also here, we'll do the shadowing with textures we learned in the previous part. Here I applied this texture with leaves to suggest that the bush is in the foreground quite close to us. 8. Shadows | Part 2: The last shape is the cone. It's similar to the cylinder but pointed on the top. With this tree, it looks slightly different because of the rounded bottom which will be in the shadow by the way. But further, it's exactly the same as a cone. I choose for the lawn a bit of strokes because as I said before, cypress trees have long branches that grows upwards. Not only greenery itself can be drawn with simple shapes but also objects around the greenery. For example flower-pots. The most common mistake a lot of beginning artists make is that they draw pots as if they were two-dimensional, frontal view and no shadows. Off course, there are different situations, but when pots are on the ground and not extremely far away from us, we always see the top. If I talk about the rounded part, it has the shape of an ellipse. So all the horizontal lines we'll brown it. The ellipses create can vary from a full circle to almost a straight line. The closer the pot holes the wider is the ellipse. In the most cases we see the thickness of the pots edge and drawing in it makes our sketches look much more realistic and interesting. As for shadowing, it's exactly the same thing as with a cylinder. The only difference is the shadow under the wider part of the pot. Some pots have more degraded elements. All of them would be light on the top-left and darker at the bottom right, and they have their own cast shadow. When we have to deal with a box shape flower pot, we also see the top and we'll also have an edge to draw. As for shadowing, the same thing as we just saw when we talked about the greenery, lighter top, make those on the front side, shadow at left side, and the cast shadow. In this example, the light source is on the right, but I wanted to show you how significant the role of shadows in the sketch is. It makes the whole picture shine. Something very different about shadows, but not less important. In the previous classes, I saw some of my students struggling with greenery against the wall. By the way, I have to say that I find it very brave when you guys try things out and sometimes they turn out amazing as well and sometimes not so much, but experimenting is a fantastic thing to do. I thought it would be a great moment to show you how to deal with the greenery that is placed against a wall. We didn't cover this kind of greenery in this class, because it's a quite tricky for beginners. But in essence, it's actually the same idea. The lighter side mittens and the core shadows in there. The difficult part is to make it look loose and lively. The mistake I see is that the cast shadow looks like a very thick contour line next to the plant. Instead, I would recommend you to draw with much looser, with darker tones close to the leaves and lighter further from them. This way you create a more natural nicer shadow. The last thing I want to demonstrate in this video is how to deal with blanks in the greenery scene. It's not exactly about shadowing, but I thought it belongs here more than in any other part of this class. I'll be exaggerating a bit, but this is how it works. Let's take this scene as an example. Now, everything's flat and boring, you can't see that all the objects are in the middle ground. If we won't make clear that something, in this case, the bush in the middle, is closer to us than other objects. We only need to add a darker shade behind it. When we add more textures and shadows it's often at the bed, the difference between the plants becomes very obvious. In this example, I made the building behind the trees darker, which makes them look closer to us than the building. Here is the same thing but with a forest in the background. The light colors of the closest bushes and dark shades behind them, make the bushes come forward. This is all for shadowing, I hope you now understand how it works. Of course, the most important thing is as always, to practice and to experiment. The exercise for this part is to finish your contour sketches from the third video. Use textures from the texture exercises or make up your own and try to apply it as shadows to your contour drawings. Of course, if you like to draw greenery pots against the wall or try to play with the plants, I'll be absolutely happy to see that too. 9. Colors | Part 1: Greenery can be in all possible colors. Flowers can make it look very colorful, but also seasons in the distance have a certain influence. Since it's beginner's class, I want to keep it simple and give you just some basics of how to color your greenery. I know that the most of you use watercolor for coloring your sketches list, so it seemed a good idea to use it in this class. A lot of artists and especially beginners, tend to use green paints for the greenery, and that's not so strange. There are at least two different greens in every watercolor set, and why wouldn't you use them for the greenery? The answer' is very simple. If you do this, you're greenery, looks dull and boring. In reality, greenery is not really green, it consists of a huge amount of colors, from yellow to dark blue, sometimes a bit brown or orange. Of course, it will be crazy to use a 100 colors to sketch a simple tree, so I want to show you how to do this using just two primary colors, yellow and blue. You can always decide to experiment and add other colors to this mix. But before we go over the mixing yellows and blues, I want to answer one of the most asked questions I get from students in different classes. The question is, I use a good-quality watercolor, but my artworks look pale and dull, how can I get colors looking bright? The answer to this question is actually very simple. Use more color pigment and less water, but it might be less easy in practice, I hope these tips will help you. First of all, make your watercolor wet before use. I think this is actually the most important one. Second, use a brush that is able to hold a good amount of paint and water in its belly. For instance, sable hair brushes would be a good choice but there are also other great brushes you can find. A third, practice with varying amount of water and paint. It's not only important for getting colors bright, but also for getting them light of drawing the background. Remember, colors in the background appear much duller than in the foreground. Let me show what I mean exactly by practicing. The bright color in the partial of it, the brush should be a bit too wet by the way, so I get rid of overflow and water. Get enough pigment, with my brush, bring it to my mixing palette to mix water and the color pigment, and then apply to the paper. This is a sample with brightest color, a lot of pigment and little water, let's make it a bit light by adding some of water. The last sample is the lightest, a lot of water, a little pigment. If you're new to watercolor, practice a bit long of a different colors and different amounts of water to get used to it. Now you know how to use watercolor, let's take a look at color mixing. I'm going to use warm trans yellow paint and this indanthrone blue. As I said in the introduction video for this class, if you don't have these colors, no worries, you can replace them with any other warm yellow and blue, like codename yellow and ultramarine blue. I'm going to develop the mix color from a very light tint to a very dark green shade using only these two colors. It's not only good exercise, but also a great way to create your own color palette, so you don't need to reinvent the view every time you draw greenery. Again, I get enough yellow pigment, bring it to the color palette, put some blue next to it, and mix. Now I do the same with another mix, in this case, winsor yellow and ultramarine blue. Maybe too much blue pigment at the end but it is an experiment. You can say that mixing different yellows and blues creates very different greens. This is also because when we draw a scene with a lot of greenery, we can easily create a distinction between all the trees and bushes. Notice that you should be careful with using blue hues like winsor blue and cerulean blue. These colors are all ready bit greenish, but more like ocean water. When you mix them with lemon yellow or any other cool yellow, you get a very unnatural flashy green, however, if you make some but that warm, almost orange-yellow, you will get a nice fresh green. How to apply colors in the sketches? There are actually two main ways to sketch with watercolor and fine liners. First by applying water color first and then the fine liner, we will do it in this class, and second, applying the fine line of first and then the water color. You draw the whole scene with a fine liner and then color it. It's a matter of preference but you can also alternate these techniques or even mix them. But if you decide to draw using the second method, a fine liner first, you need to keep in mind a few things. The most important one is that the fine liner must be waterproof, if it's not, it will smudge when you begin painting with watercolor and ruin your sketch. Here's an example of how I draw with tree before applying watercolor. It's different from the exercises we did in the previous parts, because when we use both, the line and the color, there is a chance that the sketch becomes overloaded with details and textures. To prevent that, we have to keep the fine line when drawing light by leaving gaps and contour, adding fewer textures and details and creating volume with watercolor. But back to the first method where we apply the watercolor first. Here, I use the same method of mixing colors as I showed you before. I'm going to use different yellows and blues this time, but it's very important how you apply the watercolor paper. Just touch the paper with your brush, rotate it slightly, with the pressure leaves some gaps. Wait a minute, and then add some more blue pigment and apply it in the same way. As you can see, we've created the volume with the color now, more yellow on the lighter side, more blue on the shadowed side. Let's make another spot for practicing. Exactly the same, dodge, rotate, with the pressure, leave gaps and add more blue pigment. You could try to paint faster or slower, try to wait until the first layer is dry or paint wet on wet, it's essential that you experiment and try to find out what works the best for you. Here you can clearly see the difference between the color mixes, trans yellow, for instance, is very warm color that creates a nice shiny looking mix. 10. Colors | Part 2: Do you remember what I told you about colors in the distance when we discussed the planes? To create such mix, I'm going to use cobalt blue with ocher, these colors are less dominant. I draw a horizontal line to determine the bottom of the pores and the background. Then with short strokes of different length back and forth, I create a suggestion of three similar distance, constantly mixing colors. Some darker shade here. The same idea of separating the planes as I showed you in the previous video, but this time with color. I use mixes of raw sienna with ultramarine and burnt umber with ultramarine for trunks and branches. Why just not one color? The same reason as for green. The wood is not exactly brown. It consists of so many different colors and the eden blue would create a more natural, more interesting look. Also here, we can play with proportions of colors in the mix. More warm brown tints, Sierra or burnt umber on the lighter side, more cool blue tints in the shadow. If you did the exercise with the brush bell, It must be piece of cake for you to draw all this branches. I had some more blue tints for branches behind, because they're further and in the shadow. I had some grass or short pointed strokes, again more yellow on the lighter side, more blue on the shadowed side. Note I add some more dark shades to create more contrast in the foreground. The middle ground is quite light, but of course, there is a bit more blue in a distance. Some dark shades to get the tree and the bush forward and the coloring is done. Now we only need to add the fine liner as we practiced before. But again, when you use color, the texturing and detailing will be less present. I had bit trans yellow here, to get the colors together. Holla! We have a tree a bush and a very simple greener as seen. By the way, when you use the fine liner before the watercolor, the coloring method will be exactly the same. This is all for coloring. I hope you enjoyed this part. I personally love to play with different color mixes. Now, just practice with these techniques. Use a fine liner or watercolor purists try out different colors and brushes. If you have a few, change the pressure. Add other colors to your mixes, enjoy, and don't be afraid of making mistakes. We learn more from our mistakes than from trying to get everything perfect. The last thing I want to cover shortly is how to get a darker shade with watercolor. This is another very common question I get from you guys. So there are different methods to get a darker shade. I want to mention three of them, as we saw before, using more pigment and less water would make a color look intense and darker. Another way to get a darker shade, is by applying multiple layers, and it's essential to try underlining first. Last but not least, using a darker color in the mix. By darker color, I mean that in a yellow and blue mix, yellow could be replaced with for example, orange, or prompted like yellow or burnt umber. 11. Final Thoughts: Plenty of information and exercises in this class. I hope you've learned a lot and enjoyed practicing. It was a pleasure to get everything together for you. I can't wait to see all your drawings and greenery sketches in the project gallery. If you share them on Instagram, don't forget to use the hashtag., #juliahenze_skillshare. But before you go, a quick summary of the main points we covered in this class. In part 1, we talked about general rules of drawing. We learned how to see a scene like a theater stage and focus on the most interesting parts. In part 2, I showed you how to draw a tree with simple shapes and recovered the first two steps of this step-by-step drawing process. In part 3, we practiced with drawing textures in details. In part 4, I demonstrated how to do shadowing using the same simple shapes as in the second part, and textures as in the third part. Finally, we learned how to color the greenery with mixing colors. I hope everything was clear. But if you still have any questions about this class, don't hesitate to ask them on the community page, under the videos. Good luck with greenery sketching, and I hope to see very soon in many other classes, bye bye.